Friday, April 25, 2014

Google+ joins the others

I'd like to go to town on this, since there are no earthquakes right now. I've gone through a lot of social media things right from the beginning of the Internet. Our first thing at work was Compuserve. We only used it to get naked pictures at work. Then we had Usenet. I can still find the article where I exposed the Bank of Montreal with a big security error. Boy, did everybody try to kill me for that!

Blogs were the next big thing. I had a secret blog while I was at work. When I retired, I opened this one. It is still my main platform. I went heavily into Wikipedia. I never went into the teeny stuff like Facebook and Myspace.

I tried all the Google attempts, and now I forget them all. I gave Google+ a run for its money, although there was a lot duplication with the blog. The communities were a big failure, they got huge numbers but little participation. I liked posting the pictures there, but there are other ways to do that.

I won't miss g+ much, but I hope they keep Blogger going. When we had our Toronto earthquake, I had something like 10,000 hits.

Update: Everybody is now writing the obits. Some are going as far as writing them for Mr. Google himself. I can piece together what happened. Some years ago, the humans rebelled against the robots (see Internship). I remember that the humans argued that G had to get more social, and the anti-socials disagreed. Finally the argument was settled in typical fashion by pouring in billions of dollars and letting the humans have a chance. But the humans have lost, and the chief human is kicked out. Now the robots can pour more money into driverless cars. To confirm that Mr. G is dead, take a poll of the super-hot Stanford MBA class and ask where they would work for the summer for free. G can join MS on the seniors bench.

Update2: The Secret Society of Mr. G has fought back saying they have a new guy in charge. This is not the issue but rather the intensity of the effort, since the news said that thousands would be shifted. Are they keeping up the money flow? Are they going to Knolify G+?